Once in a while I'm moved to tears by the death of someone truly significant in human history. This happened to me over the last couple of days when I heard of the death of Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech play-writer who became former Czechoslovakia's first non-communist President in over forty years in late 1989. This remarkably courageous yet self-effacing intellectual whose origins in the Czech bourgeoisie made him an enemy of the communist authorities from the first became a symbol of passive intellectual resistance to an oppressive regime and ideology which had no legitimacy in post 1968 Czechoslovakia. Founder of the human rights organisation Charter '77 he spent 5 years in prison for protesting peacefully against the communist state. Yet even this didn't deter him. His reward was to be the post revolutionary president of his country, a role which he felt totally unsuited but which his countrymen felt was deservedly his. Even after he relinquished the presidency of what had by the become the Czech Republic he continued campaigning for various causes including human rights the world over and issues around the environment for the rest of his life. He devoted his life to the cause of human freedom was how one commentator described him and for this we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.